


The dangers and benefits of paradoxical undressing

by SquaresAreNotCircles



Category: Hawaii Five-0 (2010)
Genre: Banter, Cuddling & Snuggling, Established Relationship, Huddling For Warmth, M/M, and also general silliness, date night gone awry (because they ran into some criminals)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-08
Updated: 2020-02-08
Packaged: 2021-02-28 05:54:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,544
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22608859
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SquaresAreNotCircles/pseuds/SquaresAreNotCircles
Summary: “You know what I miss?” Danny had told Steve that morning, riding the small wave of homesickness that always rolls in like clockwork as December progresses. It has something to do with the incongruity of watching Santa and Rudolf and thousands of little lights materialize all throughout the city while the people in it are still wearing board shorts and slippahs. “Snow. A white Christmas. Getting really cold, you know, really freezing half to death, and then snuggling up to someone you love when you get home.”Or: Danny, Steve, and a fridge door that won’t open from the inside.
Relationships: Steve McGarrett/Danny "Danno" Williams
Comments: 22
Kudos: 197





	The dangers and benefits of paradoxical undressing

**Author's Note:**

> At one point this was going to be a Christmas fic, but Christmas kind of didn’t want to be in this, so I don’t think it’s very out of place as a February fic, either. Merry February! 🎄❄💖

“You know what I miss?” Danny had told Steve that morning, riding the small wave of homesickness that always rolls in like clockwork as December progresses. It has something to do with the incongruity of watching Santa and Rudolf and thousands of little lights materialize all throughout the city while the people in it are still wearing board shorts and slippahs. “Snow. A white Christmas. Getting really cold, you know, really freezing half to death, and then snuggling up to someone you love when you get home.”

“You wanna freeze half to death?” Steve had asked, because of course that would be the part he picked up on in this beautiful, lush picture Danny painted just for him. Figures.

Figures, also, that Steve would use his untold powers of improbably bad luck to make Danny’s wish come true the one time Danny really wishes he wouldn’t have. 

“-and it is all! Your! Fault!” Danny yells, so enraged he’s apoplectic with it, which is good, because at least anger makes his blood pump faster and will keep him warm. He’s going to need that, seeing as he might be on a tropical island but is also, oh, currently locked in a freezer.

The frustrated breath Steve huffs through his nose comes out in a tiny cloud. He folds his arms a little tighter across his chest, which makes his arm muscles bulge in the sleeves of his dress shirt, but a sight that would usually be familiar and pretty is now mostly worrying. Steve left his jacket on the back of his chair and his perfect body fat percentage is going to do way too little to keep him warm. Why hasn’t Danny been feeding him more pancakes? Why has Danny let his pride and insistence that he’s not a pancake machine get in the way of such practical considerations as tricking Steve into building the natural chubby insulation that a seal is supposed to have to survive in the wilderness? Has Steve never before seen a documentary on wildlife in Antarctica?

“-and as I’ve been trying to explain to you, it’s a fridge, not a freezer, which is good because it increases our chances of survival by at least another few factors.” Steve tilts his head and looks Danny over critically. “Hey, you listening to me, Danno?”

Not really, is the answer, but it’s not like Danny can’t guess with extreme accuracy what Steve’s been saying. It’s bound to be something like, “It’s not my fault the new restaurant I wanted to try for date night was apparently a front for a huge money laundering corporation, blah blah bah, I couldn’t have known that the restaurant owner exclusively employed hired muscle and that’s why the food was so bad but also why we shouldn’t have told him we recognized our sommelier from Interpol’s Most Wanted list, doobie doobie doo, shots were fired before we got thrown in here so someone will have called the police and they’ll find us soon enough, yadda yadda yadda.”

Danny wrenches one hand from his armpit to wave it dismissively, and then sticks it back in ASAP because at least he can pretend it’s still sort of warm when it’s there. “Yeah, I’m fine.”

Steve frowns at him. “You’re cold.”

“Wow, we have a genius in the house tonight.” Danny makes a big show of pretending to look around at the shelves full of vegetables and raising his eyebrows. “Oh wait, the genius is in the freezer – of course I’m cold! I’m shivering all over.” He frees his hand again just to make a point. When he holds it out in front of him, it’s shakier than a palm leaf during a hurricane.

“Fridge,” Steve says, and then, before Danny can call him an asshole for the correction, “and this right here is a good sign.” He grabs Danny’s hand with both of his and gives it a vigorous rubbing, like Danny’s grandmother used to do when he came inside for hot chocolate after building the biggest snowman he could. Danny’s too surprised to even complain about it. “It’s way worse when you stop shivering.”

“Right,” Danny says. At least his voice is still steady. No permanently chattering teeth yet, though it feels as if that might not be far off. “Okay.” He looks around and spots a plastic crate filled to the brim with onions. He withdraws his hand from Steve’s ministrations – it actually does feel a little better now, though – and grabs and overturns the crate, scattering onions. 

“What are you doing?” Steve asks, from right behind him. He wasn’t that close a moment ago, but Danny imagines he can feel Steve’s body heat radiating off of him.

“What fool keeps onions in the fridge?”

Steve stops rubbing his own biceps to look offended, yet slightly wary. “I do.”

Danny knows he does. It’s one of those tiny details he keeps in the back of his mind for when they have a quiet day and he wants a surefire way to start an argument, but he tuts loudly about it anyway. “Remind me why I tried to open a restaurant with you.”

“Because you love me and wanted to keep me involved in your life even when it was impractical?” All traces of hesitancy are gone from Steve’s voice and body language. It’s full-on offense now, which is perfect, because it means that when Danny grabs Steve’s arm and pulls him down to sit on the box together, pressed close and each with half an ass cheek hanging off, Steve barely even protests that, too busy with the other thing. “It’s not like I would have been in charge of onion storage, anyway. I wouldn’t have needed onion-knowledge to be a good partner, and you know what, that’s- Oh, seriously, Danny, just say you want to cuddle instead of trying to trick me into it.”

“I want to cuddle,” Danny says, because he’s not going to let getting busted interfere with his end goal. “I’m cold and everything in here is cold and you’re less so.”

Steve backs away from his own momentary flare of annoyance immediately, giving in as easily as butter to a hot knife, which is ironic. “Alright.” He rubs his own hands together a couple of times, blows on them, and then wraps his huge arms around Danny’s shoulders, drawing Danny closer. “You know what would work even better? If you sat in my lap.”

“Yeah,” Danny says. “No.” It’s not that it’s not a nice, marginally warmer thought, but there are certain boundaries he’ll never be able to uncross. Sitting in Steve’s lap for unsexy reasons is like peeing in a bottle while Steve drives: it’s awkward, he doesn’t really want to do it, and chances are that Steve’s crazy will eventually make him, anyway. 

Still that might, hopefully, be some moments away yet. For now, to keep himself from worming his hands into Steve’s shirt and pressing them to the warm stomach hidden there, he needs Steve to keep talking. The only problem is that there aren’t a lot of fun subjects around and his mind keeps circling one particular thing. “So remind me what the symptoms of hypothermia are?”

“Shivering,” Steve says immediately, because of course he’d have this knowledge ready at the drop of a wooly hat and of course he’d almost enjoy talking about it, and all without realizing how worrying what he’s saying actually is. “Then mental changes, like confusion, decreased reflexes, loss of fine motor skills and slurred speech. It might escalate to hallucinations. Vital signs drop. In the end, people sometimes start huddling in small spaces.”

Danny gives in and puts a hand on Steve’s chest, but he covers for his weakness by pretending to rub some warmth into Steve. “Like we’re doing?”

Steve’s stomach twitches, but he doesn’t object to being groped by ice cube fingers. He’s a loyal partner. “No, in closets and under tables. It’s a self-protective instinct of the dying, like a hibernating animal. The term for it is terminal burrowing.”

Danny pauses his hands to let the full depressing moroseness of that sink in. They couldn’t even do any burrowing in here: they’re surrounded by open shelves and boxes that would barely fit Eddie, let alone a grown human being. “Cheery.”

Steve makes a small noise of assent. Danny can feel it hum through Steve’s chest. “Another thing that might happen is paradoxical undressing, which is when people are disoriented and confused and start feeling overheated as certain parts of the brain shut down, so they get naked.”

“Well,” Danny says, considering what a nightmare it would be to put in the detailed work of pushing the buttons of his shirt through their tiny holes with frozen fish sticks for fingers, but trying to cast the whole thing in a cheerier light, “that’s horrible, but almost good. If someone’s close to hypothermia, you’re supposed to get naked with them. Skin to skin contact to transfer body heat. It’s the quickest remedy.” They’re too close to really look each other in the eye, but Danny can feel Steve side-eye him from up close for taking over the lecture. “I read it somewhere.”

Danny can’t _feel_ Steve’s left eyebrow do something skeptical, but he knows it’s doing it, anyway. “What were you reading? Porn?” 

“C’mon, I don’t _read_ my porn.”

Steve skips right past that, which might be a wise choice. “You’d at least need a good sleeping bag or something like it for a body heat transfer to really do the work it needs to, or you’d just both end up naked and in even more danger.”

“Yeah,” Danny says, appropriately horrified. He’s always been a visual thinker. “Let me make one thing very clear: I don’t want to be found dead with your dangly bits frozen to my ass.”

Steve winces, his arms tightening around Danny for a moment. Danny kind of likes that. “Much as we enjoy being near your ass, my dangly bits and I agree.”

“You worry me sometimes,” Danny tells him, because that’s another thing Danny always likes.

“Only sometimes?”

“Why do you say that like it’s something to be proud of? You shouldn’t want to worry people, Steve. That’s not nice.”

Steve, seeing as he’s both a little bit of an asshole and a little bit of a broken man, starts smiling. “I like it when you worry about me. Lets me know you care.”

Danny has to wonder if Steve’s brain is the first part of him that’s suffering from frostbite, and how long it will take until he tries to terminally burrow himself in Danny’s armpit. “I could also let you know I care by _telling_ you,” he says, just in case there’s still hope for Steve. He lets his hand on Steve’s chest wander to a spot that should be roughly over Steve’s heart and rubs a few circles there. “Like this: I love you, Steve.”

“It’s not the same.” Danny gets ready to slide his hands around to either Steve’s neck or where he knows the ticklish spots on Steve’s sides are – undecided as of yet – but Steve comes to his senses just in time, to his own good fortune. “But I love you, too.”

Danny knows this. It’s in no way news or something that goes unspoken, but it’s still nice to hear. “Now was that so hard?”

Steve hums mournfully. “It’s too cold in here for anything to be hard.”

“Ha!” Danny says, not so much _in_ Steve’s face as right next to it. “Admit it, you’re paradoxically undressing me right now, huh? I’m fully clothed, but in your brain I’m naked.”

“I literally just explained to you that that’s not even close to what it means.”

Danny is loath to take his hand away from Steve’s beating heart – crisis situations do something to him, okay, and it’s nice to know absolutely for sure Steve is alive – so he is forced to wriggle his other one free from all the way around Steve’s waist and in the top of Steve’s pants near his hip. He hadn’t even realized he’d started groping Steve there, too, and it’s a whole ordeal to extract his fingers, but it’s worth it to get to wag one of them at Steve, awkwardly over Steve’s own shoulder because there’s really no other good way to get that arm to a place where Steve can see it without derailing their entire cuddle session. “Ah, but you’re not denying it.”

Steve, who waited patiently for Danny to wag all the fingers he likes, doesn’t need any time to think over his own response. “Well, no. I’m not in the habit of lying to you.”

“Pff,” Danny says, because he’s actually kind of surprised that worked. On the other frozen hand, he could have known. “You and your one-track mind.”

Steve makes a noise of protest. “That’s not fair, Danny. Who suggested we cuddle up and then started talk of watching porn and getting naked, huh?”

“No getting naked!” Danny reminds him. “Please keep in mind the grave danger to penises, okay?”

As luck would have it, the door to their fridge prison groans open at that moment. As _bad_ luck would have it, it does so while Danny is still talking, and it reveals a startled looking Tani and Junior. Junior blinks in the way of a man who is not entirely sure yet if he should be worried but is opting to err on the side of caution, which tells Danny all he needs to know about whether they heard his last exclamation or not.

Tani lifts her hands in a gesture of peace and goodwill. “Yes, please, no getting naked.”

“I second that,” Junior adds, a tad hastily. The poor kid is probably having flashbacks to the kitchen incident. Danny did try to tell Steve that they should have at least put a sock on the kitchen doorknob, but neither of them were wearing socks at the time, and Junior had to suffer for it.

The blast of warm air that came in when Junior and Tani opened the freezer-fridge’s door is very alluring, but Danny is metaphorically and perhaps somewhat literally frozen to the spot. It’s Steve, who apparently does after all have that seal resistance to cold but impossibly also still manages to maintain a beach body, who gets up first and offers Danny a hand up. Danny takes it, even though it nearly hurts because his hands are starting to go numb. 

“Come on,” Steve says, as he gives Junior a pat on the shoulder and Tani a nod while he shuffles Danny past them into the failed restaurant’s kitchen, which is buzzing with HPD. “I’m taking you home and we’re drowning ourselves in blankets and hot chocolate.”

It’s a wonderful gift in theory – Steve trying to let him have that half-frozen snuggling experience he’s been yearning for since he moved here – but in practice, they’re going to be so thawed out they’ll be sweaty and wanting a cold drink by the time they make it to the house. Sometimes, though, it’s the thought that counts. Other times, it’s the thought, and cranking the Camaro’s air conditioning up to its maximum setting.

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading!! Comments are always welcome and if you are currently feeling a little chilly, please get yourself a blanket and/or a huge SEAL who runs hot. (Both can be found in the closet, probably.) ❤
> 
> I’m on Tumblr as [itwoodbeprefect](https://itwoodbeprefect.tumblr.com), or with my exclusively H50 (and mostly McDanno) sideblog as [five-wow](https://five-wow.tumblr.com).


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